Transitioning With Whitehead

Moderator: Andrew M. DavisPanelists: Matthew David Segall, Sherry D. Kling, and Thomas Jay Oord

Welcome and introductions

ANDREW DAVIS: Welcome, everybody. Good to see you all. We’re late in Beer Camp, and it looks like we still have some energy out there. I see a few smiles. This is great.

This is the Upside Down, and you saw Vecna over here. I also thought he’d be taller.

My name is Andrew Davis, and this session is titled “Transitioning with Whitehead”—and, importantly, “Personal Perspectives.” By a show of hands, how many of you are somewhat familiar with Whitehead? Okay. And for how many of you is this really a new name? A few. Excellent—a nice mix.

Our goal today is not really to ask what Whitehead thought and then argue about whether it’s true. We like to do that. Today, we’re going to assume it’s true and ask: What difference does it make? How might we name those differences at individual and collective levels?

We’re using the language of “transitioning with Whitehead” because we’re going to focus on five transitions. These are transitions in our ideas, in the sense of being ideological. Ideas inform and transform the way we think and interact with the world. Ideas are important. One of my favorite Whitehead quotes is, “Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.”

But I would say—and I hope you guys agree—that these transitions are also existential and spiritual. They involve the nature of our existence and experience, and our attitudinal disposition toward the whole of what is.

There are any number of transitions we could name in Whitehead’s universe. Some of these are lifted from the final chapter of my book, Whitehead’s Universe. We’re just going to look at five. I’ll name them quickly, introduce our guests, and then we’ll get into their different perspectives and angles. Let’s try to end with some time for questions, too. I’d love to hear what’s on your minds and how these transitions are fitting with you.

The five transitions are: from exception to exemplification; from being to becoming; from mechanism to organism; from force to persuasion; and from passivity to creativity.

There’s a certain flow here: from who we are, to what reality is and what its nature and character are like, to what sort of cosmos this is, to the nature of power and how it operates, and to the nature of our participation in the present and the future.

To my immediate right is Matt Segall, professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Matt has a beautiful way of articulating the scientific, metaphysical, and philosophical connections of this material.

To his right is Sherry Kling, our colleague at the Center for Process Studies, now leading the Templeton-funded Modern Meaning Project. She’s an expert in Whitehead and Jung, emphasizing spirituality and transformation—another important angle on these transitions.

And, of course, Tom Oord, who needs no introduction. He’s going to give us insight into the open and relational theological side of these transitions, if any—because we also have to ask what these transitions mean for how we think about the reality of God.

From exception to exemplification

ANDREW DAVIS: Let’s jump into the first transition: from exception to exemplification. This raises the question of whether human beings are just anomalies in the universe, or whether there’s a deep connection we have with this universe and what that might mean.

Matt, maybe we can start with you. From a scientific and philosophical perspective, how is the notion that we’re not an exception supported? Where are the challenges? Perhaps bring in your own work and how this transition has been central to it.

MATT SEGALL: Thanks, Andrew. When I was in my young teens, I was experimenting with atheism and reading people like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking. The basic idea in their picture of the universe is that there’s this whole physical process that’s more or less blind and dumb, and there are laws of physics that get imported from somewhere—that’s a strange element in this otherwise mechanistic view of the universe, where particles are just colliding.

After billions of years of collisions, somehow human consciousness emerges as something added on at the end. The human being is a kind of exception to what the rest of the universe is doing. As a young teen, accepting that vision felt heroic to me. It allowed me to feel smarter than all the dumb religious people who thought we were special and that God uniquely cared about our species.

Eventually, as I grew a little older and learned more about the science—the more recent physics and biology, all the alternatives, how much quantum physicists fight with each other, and how much biologists disagree with each other—I realized science was way more open than I had understood from reading the bestsellers by the New Atheists.

I realized that this idea of human beings being exceptional was problematic. I learned about the ecological catastrophe. Human exceptionalism is a big problem in terms of how we relate to the rest of the community of life on the planet.

It was around that point, when I entered graduate school, that I discovered Whitehead. All of a sudden, this problem of human exceptionalism became something I could resolve through Whitehead’s notion of exemplification. The human being and human consciousness are not an exception to what the rest of the universe is doing, but an amplification of what has always been at least nascent or pregnant. When the universe was just a cloud of hydrogen, somehow human consciousness was already there in germ.

That’s not to say that, rather than our being at the edge of an otherwise mechanistic process, now the whole of evolution is heading toward the human. I wouldn’t quite put it that way. It’s rather that we are an expression and exemplification of what the universe has always been doing.

We could say, in a kind of Teilhardian way, that the universe personalizes. Human persons are an expression of the deepest dynamics of cosmogenesis. We’re not random accidents; we’re the full flowering of what was seeded already at the origin of everything.

ANDREW DAVIS: That’s beautiful. It’s part of what he calls a radical empiricism. He’s coming from William James, who taught at Harvard before him, and saying that if we start anywhere other than human experience when trying to discern the nature and character of things, we’re starting in the wrong spot. There’s a lot that can be said for that. Thanks, Matt—a great opener.

Sherry, it seems to me that holding this notion that we’re exceptions to the universe would be detrimental to the spiritual life. From your perspective—and speak personally, too—what’s involved spiritually when we make that transition? What transformative capacities are embedded within it?

SHERRY KLING: I think there’s so much. First of all, if we think of ourselves as exceptions to the rest of nature, that effectively means we’re orphans. We’ve orphaned ourselves from the family of life.

But if we’re an exemplification—and I’m thinking of where Whitehead says our bodies lie in the field of nature—then we’re embedded within the natural world. We are what life is doing, perhaps in a particular way. If we see ourselves as embedded rather than orphaned, everything is kin to us. Everything in the natural world is our family.

We’re connected, and we can greet it. I say hello to every lizard and every squirrel when I’m walking around outside. Yesterday, when I came out of the restroom, there was a moth underneath the fountain. I put out my hand so I could get it, and it climbed into my hand. I walked outside and opened my hand, and it sat on my finger for a little while, doing this little thing like, “I need to clean up a little before I take off.” Then it went on its way. I was just like, “I love you.”

We expand our family, our connection, and our belonging when we see ourselves as exemplifications. We can also see ourselves as having a kind of dignity. What we do contributes to the life of the world and the life of God, and we can reflect on that. Perhaps part of our unique role is that we can recognize what we’re doing and how we’re contributing.

It can make our whole spiritual life come alive in a new way to see ourselves as an exemplification—as embedded, and not as an exception.

ANDREW DAVIS: How I love that statement about the body being in the field of nature. In one of my chapters, I say the body is geography. It’s just as natural as trees, rivers, and rain. If we take that seriously, doesn’t it mean that experience, in some sense, pervades nature? If not, we run into a host of philosophical problems. We don’t necessarily have to go there yet.

Spiritually, one of my favorite statements Whitehead makes—and again, I’m a Whitehead nerd—is that our experience, “dim and fragmentary as it is, yet sounds the utmost depths of reality.” What is ultimate is intimate. You want to find that intimacy in the midst of your experience. That has been spiritually very significant to me.

Tom, on the theological side, what does this mean for thinking about God or human uniqueness? Part of the claim of imago Dei is a certain drawing of us out from nature, making us, at least in some interpretations, an exception. Is this a challenge to that?

THOMAS JAY OORD: I think it is. Let me begin by saying that Andrew quotes Whitehead really well. I’m going to quote the Bible.

I think the first Bible verse I ever learned is probably one many of you know: “For God so loved the world.” Another one I learned said, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who doesn’t love doesn’t know God, for God is love.” Then there are the first and second commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

I come from a tradition where people ask, “What’s your personal verse?” For the last twenty years, mine has been Ephesians 5:1: “Imitate God, as dearly beloved children, and live a life of love, as Christ loved us.”

Love is at the core of how I want to live my life and how I think about God. I know there are passages of scripture that don’t support those love themes, but I think the majority point toward a God of love.

Next to the Bible, the most influential theologian in Christian history is Augustine. If you want to know what he has to say about love, look at his book Teaching Christianity. Here’s what he says: Love is a craving or desire, and it takes two forms. Love is frui or uti. Love either enjoys or uses.

What does this mean for God? He thinks God would only want the highest good, the thing of most value, and that’s God’s self. So God must only enjoy God’s self—which is another way of saying God only loves God’s self.

But what about you? Does God use us? Well, he says, I guess we have to say God uses us, but not in the same way we use things, because God has no needs.

The most formative theologian in the Christian tradition takes “God so loved the world” and replaces it with “God really just loves God’s self.” Loving our neighbors is actually not loving our neighbors for their sake; it’s loving God through our neighbors.

That seems so at odds with the Bible I was taught and still read. Why would he go that route? Augustine wants a God who is an exception, not an exemplification. He wants a God who is outside time, unaffected, unchanging, and who only loves God’s self. That is the formal Christian tradition coming through Augustine. In that case, God is an exception to everything we know as loving, and an exception to what the vast majority of scripture says about a God of love.

Whitehead comes along and says we’re not invoking God as an exception to the categories of existence to save them from collapsing on themselves. Rather, God is the chief exemplification of existence. That spins out as saying God is in time, God is relational, and God changes in some respects. God not only loves God’s self; God loves you and me.

That is a beautiful thing, and far more scriptural than what Augustine and many in the tradition have said. That’s God as an exemplification of the categories of existence rather than an exception to them.

ANDREW DAVIS: That’s great. It’s also a distinction, we might say, between a natural and a supernatural framing of God. Historically, God supernaturally establishes the ultimate conditions of being and becoming but is not bound by them. That’s a supernatural framing.

But is God metaphysically connected to the world somehow? That’s a problem. What bridge do you cross experientially to get from one side to the next? Unless you’re just quiet—a hush of apophatic silence.

To say there is a metaphysical bridge connecting what is here and what is there, as it were, although it’s always present, means there is a bridge we can traverse experientially and rationally to God as the chief embodiment of those ultimate principles of being and becoming.

One quick follow-up, and I wonder if you can do it in one sentence each. What do you say to the critic who says, “Calling human beings an exemplification seems like a demotion, and I’m rather keen to preserve the uniqueness of human beings”? Can we still be unique if we exemplify the nature and character of nature?

MATT SEGALL: I think we can still consider ourselves the imago Dei, but also microcosmoi—that is, mirrors of the cosmos—and our unique role is to mirror the cosmos, to celebrate the whole of creation. That’s what makes us unique. We’re both unique and universal in our relationship to the whole cosmos.

SHERRY KLING: I would say there is a unique role we can preserve in that imago Dei sense, that sense of being the face of God in the world. There is great dignity in being human.

I also want to mention that I’ve come to bristle a little when people say “the more-than-human world.” I prefer “the other-than-human world.” We want to acknowledge that it’s not just nonhumans versus humans, but I also don’t want to demote humans so much that everything else is “more than.” I want to say “other than human.” That’s my personal preference.

THOMAS JAY OORD: I’m with them. My one sentence would be: Yes, humans are unique in some ways, but I’m much more interested in lifting the intrinsic status of nonhuman creatures than in trying to make a big gap between humans and everybody else.

ANDREW DAVIS: Brilliant. Whole books could be written on that topic—and have been. Thanks for your comments.

From being to becoming

ANDREW DAVIS: The second transition is from being to becoming. At the heart of a Whiteheadian vision is this notion that reality is verb-like before it’s noun-like, that becoming is more fundamental than being. This seems to have important pragmatic outcomes for how we think about our lives and our ideas.

Sherry, how important is this notion that we’re unfinished? If we’re not confined to the noun-like fixations of the past, and the future is open, what does that mean spiritually? Perhaps give a personal example.

SHERRY KLING: It means a great deal, especially for those of us who have suffered trauma or adverse childhood experiences, or who have been stuck in conditions that haven’t caused flourishing in our lives. If we were beings who were fully determined, there wouldn’t be much hope for positive change.

But if we are becomings—and yes, there is real pressure from the past. Whitehead wouldn’t deny that. The past puts pressure on the next moment. It is much easier simply to repeat the past. That’s what complexes are all about: a complex makes us react to life from an image based on the past.

If we are always in the process of becoming, and new possibilities come in every moment from God, as Whitehead and process theologians say, then there’s always hope for positive change. There’s always movement and possibility. Within our current finite conditions, the next step toward positive change may be minuscule, but it’s there. That is very hopeful to me.

ANDREW DAVIS: Matt, metaphysically or scientifically, how have we suffered under a dominant modern vision of substance and matter—the idea that what is fundamental is dead, vacuous matter? That changed with advances in the sciences. Whitehead paid attention to that. How do you frame this transition in light of those advances?

MATT SEGALL: Scientifically, I think the role of possibility is important. What makes becoming, rather than being, important metaphysically is that possibilities are suddenly just as relevant as actualities.

With the quantum revolution—and even before that, in the nineteenth century with thermodynamics—there was a realization that we can’t actually predict where every atom is. We can’t know where it is right now, at t1 and we can’t predict where all the atoms will be at, say, t5. We need statistics to do science.

Rather than a fully reductionistic science in which you can literally be certain where every particle is, there was a nineteenth-century shift, through the study of thermodynamics, toward statistical reasoning about nature. Quantum physics builds on that, recognizing, on some interpretations, that even in principle, if we knew all the initial conditions, we still couldn’t predict how the so-called wave function is going to collapse.

Whitehead is obviously a process philosopher. He titles his magnum opus Process and Reality. But in that book, it’s not just that reality is composed of these becomings, these actual occasions of experience, and that “no thinker thinks twice,” as he says. Yes, we’re different in each moment, there are actual occasions. But there are also eternal objects.

He’s just as much a thinker of permanence and eternity. The primordial nature of God is out of time and knows everything there is to know about possibilities. What God doesn’t know is how the actual future will unfold.

Heraclitus and Parmenides in the ancient Greek world are holding it down for becoming and being—flux and form, you might say. Whitehead is like Plato, who is already synthesizing these two great visions in the ancient world. Parmenides says being is; Heraclitus says everything flows. Plato synthesizes that in the Timaeus and other dialogues, like the Sophist, saying that becoming is also a kind of being.

Whitehead is doing something similar. He’s a process philosopher, but he’s not simply getting rid of eternity. It’s becoming with being, or being with becoming.

ANDREW DAVIS: That addition of possibility as a reality, rather than just actuality, seems important for Sherry’s comment, too. If there were only actualities with efficient causation, all the past would do is determine the present. You can see how we would endlessly repeat. Possibilities allow the present to be different and to chart new paths of transformation. That seems very significant.

Tom, let’s come to you on becoming in God. Isn’t this a contradiction? Matt just talked about the eternity of God. How can God be eternal and becoming? And why does God need to become?

THOMAS JAY OORD: Let me start by saying I’m attempting an audacious task: writing a three-volume systematic theology of love. There have been lots of really good progressive books in theology, but the last really influential systematic theology from a progressive perspective was probably Paul Tillich’s books, written sixty to seventy years ago.

In those books, Tillich reacts against the kind of God I imagined as a kid. I thought God was up there somewhere in the clouds, a particular embodied individual who might occasionally come down and talk to Moses, but never to me. God needed a Holy Spirit—whatever that was—to send out there, but God in God’s self was this being who might intervene from time to time.

Tillich rightly came down hard on that view. He says God’s not like that; God is everywhere. He comes up with the language of God as “being itself” or “the ground of being.” It has the advantage of encouraging us to think of God as omnipresent, right down to the smallest and up to the largest.

But there’s a huge disadvantage. Being, for Tillich, doesn’t have the kind of dynamism that becoming suggests. It’s really hard to imagine a lover who is in all respects unchanging, unmoved, and unaffected. Yet, in essence, that’s the kind of God Tillich wants to give us with “being itself.” In academic terms, this is called onto-theology: theology based on the being of God.

I like the living God of the Bible. I don’t think it makes much sense to say God is truly a lover, giving and receiving moment by moment, if God is unchanging being itself. That’s where Whitehead comes to the rescue. He has a God whose experience changes moment by moment—a becoming God. Not that God wasn’t God in the past and is now becoming God, but that God’s experience moves and changes moment by moment. God even learns new information, as Matt says.

This dynamic, relational, living God has a nature that’s unchanging, but experience that changes moment by moment. Instead of the onto-theology of the God of being itself, I decided to invent a new word, because I like inventing words. I went back to my Greek studies: the Greek for becoming is ginomai.

So gino-theology is a theology of a becoming God—not a God who didn’t used to be God and now is, but a God who has always been God throughout all eternity, and who learns, changes, and experiences moment by moment in a dynamic, living way.

ANDREW DAVIS: I wonder if we could have a brief comment from each of you about the significance of time here. Philosophically, scientifically, spiritually—the temporal dimension takes time. Theologically, this is obviously controversial. What’s the relevance of becoming to time?

MATT SEGALL: We usually think of time as what clocks are trying to measure. But just because it’s 3:42 on the clock doesn’t mean the clock is causing it to be that time. The clock itself is aging.

We have all these ways—clocks and calendars—to try to measure time, but we don’t actually get at time as we live through it. Whitehead’s vision of becoming points not to some measurable quantity that appears in physics equations as t, but to the growth we experience as human beings and witness in the vegetal and animal worlds. It’s a creative process that seems to intensify experience as it goes.

Bringing Whitehead’s vision of becoming to bear on how physics usually thinks about time breaks us free of the clutches of a kind of clockwork mechanism, which we’ll get to in the next transition. It allows us to see that time, concretely speaking, is a process of qualitative growth. It’s not just something quantifiable.

ANDREW DAVIS: Time is a process of growth. That seems very relevant to the spiritual side of things.

SHERRY KLING: It’s interesting for me because I’m thinking in two different ways. There is that hopefulness that the next moment can be different from the current moment.

There’s suicide in my family, and there have been times when I’ve considered it and been close. It was because I thought, “My life is never going to change. This pain is never going to get better.” But if there’s a sense of flow, and that in the next moment there’s always possibility, that’s hopeful.

At the same time, I want to think about the now, the power of now: God, the “I am,” is the now. Not “future-tripping,” as William Paul Young likes to say.

There’s almost a spaciousness in the now, where the spirit is. I’m thinking of that moment in concrescence—Whitehead’s word for that becoming—that moment of solitariness where the decision is made about what that moment will actualize. It seems almost like that pregnant pause of the spirit, of the now, where possibility is present. We can respond in a way that’s not just about the past, but that puts us in the flow of the now toward the next. To me, it’s both, and both are really important.

THOMAS JAY OORD: I get criticism all the time for the idea that God is in time or moving through time. People say, “Oh, your God is bound by time.” I always say, “Well, your God is stuck outside of time.”

One way to bring the two insights together is to say God’s experience is moving through time, but God’s nature or essence is timeless. Then we can have the best of both worlds.

ANDREW DAVIS: There’s always a tension in the classical tradition about how God could really know a world if God is fully outside time. After all, the world is the time-bound flux of existence. Excellent—from being to becoming.

From mechanism to organism

ANDREW DAVIS: The next transition is from mechanism to organism. Matt mentioned Whitehead’s book Process and Reality, but Whitehead didn’t actually call his philosophy “process philosophy.” He called it a “philosophy of organism.”

Matt, why? What in the sciences suggested an organic turn for Whitehead, and why did philosophy need to keep up?

MATT SEGALL: One of my favorite lines—from Science and the Modern World—is where Whitehead says “Science is becoming the study of organisms. Physics studies the smaller organisms, and biology studies…” he says, “the larger” ones. I would say the midsize ones, because astrophysics studies the really big organisms.

What he’s intuiting is that, already in the early twentieth century, there was what was called the organicist movement in biology. Whitehead influenced it and was influenced by it. Then, with general systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy developed an approach to studying the whole of nature as a series of nested, self-organizing systems.

Complex systems science comes out of that in the later twentieth century. The Santa Fe Institute is known for continuing the study of complexity. On that reading, whether you’re talking about atomic elements, stars and galaxies, cells, multicellular organisms, whole ecosystems, or whole economies, what there are, finally, are self-organizing systems—organisms, in other words.

There are different approaches to studying organisms. Autopoiesis is an important concept developed by Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, Chilean theoretical biologists. Has anyone heard that term before? It just means “self-making.” They think organisms are self-making systems: autopoiesis.

More recently, the Whiteheadian feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway criticized this view and said, “No, organisms are sympoietic, not autopoietic.” She says “nothing makes itself.” Why? Because everything is in relationship with everything else.

If you think organisms are just autopoietic, closed systems—autopoeticists even use the term “operational closure” to describe an autopoietic system—you might get the wrong idea. You might lose the relational element that’s present in Whitehead and that Haraway brings forward with sympoiesis.

So I want to break open this idea of organismic closure, so maybe what we really want is a transition from mechanism to orgasm.

ANDREW DAVIS: We might have a whole lot more adherents if we used that terminology. The philosophy of orgasm!

MATT SEGALL: From organic realism, which was great, to orgasmic realism.

ANDREW DAVIS: He must have gotten that joke at Harvard. If I were a student, I’d be like, “Why not? Just a couple of letters missing.”

Thank you, Matt. That was beautiful. I like the notion of self-making in relation. Sherry, isn’t there a personal self-making aspect to the spiritual life? But don’t we falter to the extent that we restrict it to the self? The relational component seems really important.

SHERRY KLING: In my workshop about dreams, I asked the question, “Who’s on our team?” When we deconstruct religion or walk away from organizations and systems, we can feel really alone and isolated. Is it all up to me?

But who’s on your team? If we have a relational reality and a relational God, God is on our team. Jung talked about a relational psyche, where the psyche is always in contact with an autonomous, objective other: the collective unconscious. There’s always that confrontation. The self is never developed alone. The psyche is always in a compensatory relationship with the unconscious, which is always bringing something new to the discussion.

Think about the difference between mechanism and organism. A machine has parts. Think of the parts of a car or the gears in a machine. They can only be what they are at the beginning. They never change. They do one thing, and one thing only.

But if life is an organism and connected to everything—I’m thinking of tree roots, the mother tree, and fungi—there are always new things coming into the system. There are always new things coming into the psyche from the unconscious and new possibilities coming from God.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but what is the more hopeful image? If we’re just machine parts playing a role that never changes, our future is foreclosed. If we’re part of a living system where new information is coming, part of a flow, there’s so much more aliveness, vitality, zest—and orgasm. Why not?

[Brief cross-talk and wordplay.]

ANDREW DAVIS: Tom, Teilhard and a number of others have said God creates self-creators. That’s a form of creation, but it’s markedly different from a typical understanding of creation. How would you frame that? What are the issues involved?

THOMAS JAY OORD: First, I want to celebrate a shift over the last few hundred years in theology toward recognizing human agency. We call it freedom or free will; humans have some kind of role. Even someone like Alvin Plantinga, who comes from a Reformed, Calvinist perspective, gives a free-will defense. He believes in real libertarian free will.

That’s a big plus, especially when we’re talking about the problem of evil. Why didn’t God stop this? The quick answer is that people were using their freedom and God doesn’t want to override it. But usually, when people think of God, they regard that as God’s choice.

One thing Whitehead does in the shift to organism is think about agency all the way down. That helps us give a better answer to the problem of evil, especially natural evil. Why didn’t God stop the pandemic? Maybe the viruses have some agency, too, that even God can’t control. As I see it, God is an uncontrolling lover of everyone and everything.

The idea of the world as a machine, in which you and I are just cogs, was already breaking down as people recognized that we have agency. Whitehead takes that all the way to the bottom: it’s agency all the way down. That agency relates, as Sherry says, in real organismic ways. That’s why God can really love the whole wide world. My favorite line is: from quarks to quinoa to queers to quasars.

ANDREW DAVIS: Was it quinoa?

THOMAS JAY OORD: Quinoa. I needed a Q in there.

SHERRY KLING: I want to add one thought. Moving from mechanism to organism also changes how we can think about prayer. If the world is a machine, or a computer system whose software has already been coded, we have to pray to the one doing the coding. We have to plead with the one who made the machine to act upon it, or to recode the software.

But if we’re part of an organism that is alive with agents, what if our prayers go horizontally as well as vertically? What if I can pray for Matt and actually pray to the cells in his body? Or for the natural world? What if I can influence the aims that the agents in this system want to actualize, and perhaps persuade them? Maybe we all have that power. Maybe prayer is more like that.

ANDREW DAVIS: Beautiful. Prayer for me is not requesting; it’s listening.

TOM OORD: Praying horizontally also works with orgasm.

ANDREW DAVIS: Now we’re stuck in a mode. There’s a photo album Tom will show you.

MATT SEGALL: Moving right along. One more thing on the mechanism-to-organism piece. Earlier, I said this mechanistic vision of the universe has particles banging into each other, but where do these laws of physics come from?

The one thing scientific materialism, reductionistic physicalism, and intelligent design share is a mechanistic picture of the universe. Whether it’s a coercive God or an absent God who left his laws behind, where did these laws come from? Moving to organism means moving to a completely different vision, not only of nature, but of the divine. It’s not coercive.

ANDREW DAVIS: Before we move on, let me come back a little. Look at the unbelievable success of AI and all that’s being accomplished. Isn’t this evidence that a mechanistic, algorithmic, computational picture is more correct rather than less? You’ve recently written a book on the topic. Could you give us a minute or two on AI’s connection with this transition?

MATT SEGALL: The book—which I wish were here, but was late getting delivered—is Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence.

As a panexperientialist, I often get asked, “You must think AI is conscious, right?” It’s just not that simple. Semiconductors with transistor logic gates and electrons flowing through them according to digitized codes, which might have been learned through this fascinating neural-network machine-learning process—it’s astounding. It’s one of the most amazing technological achievements.

But there’s no meaning being realized in those transistors. There’s certainly no consciousness being realized in those transistors. Even from a Whiteheadian point of view, we could say the electrons might be these pulses of blind emotion, but Whitehead would distinguish between the physical purposes being realized by those electrons and propositional feelings.

Sorry, I’m getting into the Whiteheadese here. Consciousness, for Whitehead, is not what pervades the universe. He distinguishes consciousness from experience. We can acknowledge the experience of silicon atoms and electrons without claiming that consciousness is somehow being achieved in server farms.

For Whitehead, consciousness requires billions of years of cellular collaboration to give rise to our physiology and nervous systems, to channel experience from our environment into what he calls the interstices of the brain. As we learned from Shaleen Kendrick, our hearts also have neurons, our guts have neurons. All our organs participate in the realization of what we call consciousness.

I see no reason to think AI, as it currently exists, would be conscious, even as a panexperientialist.

ANDREW DAVIS: I wanted to bring that up because the success of AI risks a return to a certain style of mechanistic thinking and raises all sorts of new debates. Remembering the Human Microcosm is a great book, less than a hundred pages—and believe me, Matt can do more than that. Excellent. Thank you, guys.

From force to persuasion

ANDREW DAVIS: The next transition is one of my favorites, and we’ll let Tom lead: from force to persuasion.

Whitehead remains one of the most voracious critics of power in the modern world, and theological power at that. I often suggest we can put him alongside the other masters of suspicion—Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud—without holding to their ultimately atheistic conclusions.

What does this transition mean theologically? What are we giving up, and what are we gaining? Cornel praised Whitehead and then said there were other things he didn’t like about him. Maybe he meant that a God without omnipotent power is not enough to liberate communities of suffering. I’m curious to hear your take.

THOMAS JAY OORD: That’s definitely something I want to address. I said there’s been movement over the last few hundred years toward recognizing that at least humans have free will. Part of that has meant a decline in theological determinism: the idea that God controls absolutely everything.

Nine people out of ten I talk to think that view ends up portraying God as a real jerk because of all the bad things. Now that I’m not at [institution unclear] anymore, I can say “a real dick.” I don’t cuss well; I’m from the holiness tradition.

But free-will theists, who rightly talk about freedom—and some even extend it down to smaller agents of reality—still want to hold on to a God who could force things but chooses persuasion most of the time. God makes sure the really important things happen by force, but for the rest, God persuades.

There are lots of problems with that. One is that God apparently cares enough about only a few super-important things to make sure they get done, but not other things. The problem of evil rears its ugly head again.

If, however, you have a God who simply can’t control anyone or anything—and by “anyone,” I mean more than humans, down to the smallest level—a God who can’t be the sole cause of any event, then you have a way to solve the biggest question atheists, agnostics, and most believers ask: the problem of evil. God simply can’t rescue single-handedly. God requires our cooperation.

I’m a liberationist. I believe God wants to see the liberation of oppressed people. But often, when I present this model of God to Cornel West and others, they say, “What happened to God the liberator? I’m hoping God is going to liberate us from our oppression.”

I like that idea, too. But when I’m being really snarky, I say to Cornel, “How’s that working out for you?” That God has been asleep at the switch for thousands and thousands of years. In some instances, people seem to gain their freedom, but in lots of others, not so much.

What if God is a God of liberation, always working for the liberation of all oppressed people, but God requires our cooperation? There’s a persuasive rather than a forceful element here. God is an active agent, just not a controlling agent. That’s at least one way to interpret Whitehead’s view of persuasion and force.

ANDREW DAVIS: Sherry, thinking about spirituality, transformation, and psychology, can transformation ever be forced? In a therapy setting or a theological setting, it seems there has to be freedom, persuasion, and agency.

SHERRY KLING: We can resist transformation. We can be stubborn, and life will, I think, ratchet up the pressure as time goes by, because life is about change and transformation.

I wrote a song called “Crack in the Door.” I was thinking about times when I really wanted something to change in my life, like a behavior pattern. There’s this idea that if I pray, “I’m willing to let this go,” that’s a step toward healing. Sometimes I wasn’t even willing to say that. But I could say, “I’m willing to be willing.” To me, that was enough of a crack in the door to let God come through. That’s what the chorus says.

I have to be willing to open the door. Jung said that when we don’t work with the unconscious material coming to us, it comes to us as illness or fate. I have to be willing, and then I can move with the help that comes.

But I also want to mention another side of this, which relates to liberation and communities, and to individuals experiencing trauma, abuse, and horrible situations. There’s a beautiful book called Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker. They discuss atonement and their rejection of this idea of an abusive father who sends his son to be killed to save and heal the world. They each share very personal experiences of abusive situations.

Rebecca Parker’s story concerns horrific abuse she experienced at the hands of a neighbor when she was about five. She says that in the midst of the worst of it, she had an absolutely clear sense that God was in the corner of the room. She could see God’s light there. She said, “I knew that if this neighbor could have turned and seen that light, there is no way he could have done what he did.”

She could feel God in that space, desperately trying to get this man’s attention, and he wouldn’t look. Again, that goes back to agency.

In a way, maybe that’s not enough. It doesn’t feel like enough for someone in an experience like that. At the same time, there’s that companioning, that presence. I come back to Jesus on the cross. He wasn’t rescued from the cross, but God was with him. He felt abandoned, according to the narrative, but I believe that presence never left him.

It’s comforting, at least to some degree, that the presence is always there, trying to get the world to change.

ANDREW DAVIS: That’s beautiful. Thank you.

THOMAS JAY OORD: I love what you said. It reminded me of one of my favorite stories about an argument I had with a former theological colleague. I was laying out this vision of a God who never controls and can’t control others. He looked at me and said, “You know, Tom, your God is just doing the best he can.”

I looked at him and said, “Your God could be doing a whole lot better, but chooses not to.”

If I have to choose between a God who’s trying but can’t control and a God who could have fixed it but is letting it happen, I’d rather go with the God who’s trying but can’t control.

ANDREW DAVIS: And there’s a further distinction between a God who’s trying but can’t control, and a God who’s trying, can’t control, and also suffers with us. Whitehead has that beautiful line: God is “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

It’s one thing if God doesn’t have the power to stop evil. It’s another if, alongside that, God suffers with the world. God is part of the victimhood of existence. Creation is a risk for God, too.

THOMAS JAY OORD: Feeling all of it.

ANDREW DAVIS: Matt, I don’t want to leave you out. Go ahead and jump in. Persuasion isn’t just theological or spiritual.

MATT SEGALL: I might need to take off the science hat. “Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.” Who said that? Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche is an atheist. He doesn’t believe in a God whose urge to punish is strong.

Maybe this shouldn’t even be force versus persuasion. Maybe it should be punishment versus persuasion. If God could control, we’d never disobey. We’d always behave. We would have been created in such a way that we would naturally do what God wants us to do.

Nietzsche doesn’t believe in the punishing God. I don’t believe in a punishing God either. I’m with Nietzsche on that one: “Distrust all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.”

Instead of imagining a God who could control us but doesn’t and lets us do all this bad stuff, this persuasive vision is inspiring because it helps resolve the problem of evil. We don’t have to blame God for all the bad stuff that happens.

But I think it also indicates that the world is persuading God. While God may envision all the beauty that’s possible, God is nonetheless surprised by what the world decides to actualize. That surprise isn’t horror or embarrassment; it’s an embracing celebration.

That’s how the world, and each of us, can contribute back to the divine nature. We’re helping to enrich God’s appreciation of what could be by actualizing what would be surprising and delightful to the divine.

ANDREW DAVIS: Beautiful. Just a quick shout-out to Plato. Is he in the room?

MATT SEGALL: All we need is the idea of Plato.

ANDREW DAVIS: Whitehead famously says Plato made one of the most important intellectual discoveries in the entire history of religion: that the divine element is a persuasive agency, not a coercive agency. I just want to represent that.

The next step, of course, is to say that intellectual intuition took on flesh in the figure of Christ, who expressed divine persuasion in his life. Later, Whitehead points to Gandhi and Lord Irwin, the risk of millions dying under war and strife, and says here is a flicker and flash of divine persuasion—a bit of Galilee showing up in Gandhi.

Think about persuasion. This is no mere transition. It can have a huge effect.

From passivity to creativity

ANDREW DAVIS: Our fifth and final transition is from passivity to creativity. Whitehead is among a few thinkers—Nikolai Berdyaev, perhaps Schelling—who give creativity a cosmological and metaphysical meaning.

But instead of going there, which would be easy with Matt, I want to go to Sherry first. What role does creativity have in spiritual transformation? We’re often given prescribed ways of meditating or praying, some method or practice. Where does the space for creativity lie?

SHERRY KLING: It’s part of inspiration: when we dream, imagine, think of a better life, or imagine something shifting in our lives or relationships. I’m especially thinking of the ways the arts and creative expression can be part of our healing, and how important the expressive arts are to our growth and spiritual lives.

When we become a conduit for that flow of creativity, it can help us come to terms with our lives and see where our lives want to take us. There’s a beautiful book by Parker Palmer called Let Your Life Speak. He says something like, “Don’t tell your life what you want to do with it. Let your life tell you what it wants to do with you.”

I worked in the software industry for many years. I think I was downsized out of a job about seven times in fifteen years. It got to the point where, whenever there was another layoff, colleagues would come to me to talk. I’d say, “Don’t just look for the same thing you’ve been doing. Listen for where your life might be leading you. What conversation did you have that shimmered for you? What dream opened up a thought?”

There was a woman—I think her name was Barbara Sher—who wrote a lot of books about careers. She tells a story about a woman who came to her for career guidance. Sher worked with a lot of people and could usually help them find their new thing: what excited them, their vocation or calling.

This woman came in, and they talked for about an hour and got nowhere. Nothing suggested a next step. Sher was ready to give up and say she couldn’t help. They were walking toward the door, and the woman was picking up her things, when Sher noticed she had a book with a gorilla on the cover.

“Wait, what’s the deal with this book?”

“Oh, I love gorillas.”

“Wait a second. Sit back down.”

They started talking. The woman ended up looking for a way to get involved and joined the Friends of the Zoo organization where she lived. Eventually, she became part of a group nursing orphaned gorilla babies, or something like that, and became a caretaker of gorillas at the zoo.

This one little thing came from an awareness of what she loved. She had fallen in love with this part of life. Then they could talk about how to find the next step. When we align ourselves with that creative flow, it can open up so much.

ANDREW DAVIS: Beautiful, Sherry. Matt, what do we mean when we speak of creativity—not just in the Whiteheadian sense, but in the scientific sense? Some might say we’re simply anthropomorphizing nature by saying it has creativity. Isn’t that just a human concept, or does it go deeper?

MATT SEGALL: That might be one of Whitehead’s most radical moves: taking an idea we usually consider psychological—creativity as what human artists or scientists engage in, something unique to human genius—and saying the whole cosmos is a creative process.

He’s decentering the human and allowing us to recognize the ways in which the evolutionary process goes back to clouds of plasma, the first atoms, stars, and galaxies. None of this could have been foreseen in advance. Imagine Stephen Hawking floating out in space, observing the first cloud of hydrogen.

ANDREW DAVIS: I can imagine it.

MATT SEGALL: Even with his galaxy brain, he couldn’t have seen galaxies coming, because something creative occurred that transformed the very nature of hydrogen and allowed that new form of organization to emerge.

On the theological side, what kind of God does this imply? As Catherine Keller puts it in Face of the Deep—nobody really likes committees, but loosen up your idea of what a committee is—it’s creation by committee, in a sense. It’s a co-creative effort.

God creates with creatures, because in Whitehead’s vision, God is also a creature of creativity. Maybe the first creature, the primary creature that all subsequent creatures are in a call-and-response with, but nonetheless, God can only co-create. God lets there be plants and animals and human beings, stars and galaxies.

ANDREW DAVIS: I’d poke at Hawking, just because you brought him up. In one place in my book, I quote him saying, “Philosophy is dead” and has not kept up with physics. To which I playfully say: “Philosophy reporting: Stephen Hawking is dead and should have read more Whitehead.”

Tom, let’s come to you. Not just on whether God is creative, because I think we’re assuming that, but on the whole theological tradition. This isn’t an attempt simply to state what’s true in the most common language. There’s a creative dimension here. “Amipotence.” “Gino-theology”—did I say it right? This is creativity, is it not?

THOMAS JAY OORD: Yes, it is. I suspect most people in this room, if you’ve been around progressive circles, have heard people talk about co-creating with God. We’re co-creators. Whitehead and process thought affirm that one hundred percent. As Matt said, that co-creating isn’t just with humans; it goes down to the smallest units.

But there’s one more element. I think this co-creating is everlasting. Whitehead is known for rejecting the notion that God once existed all alone and then decided to create something from absolute nothingness. What if this co-creating, in various complexities, had no beginning?

It would require a whole new doctrine of creation, and I’ve offered one. I think God is the ever-creator, always creating alongside creatures God previously created, and there was no beginning to that everlasting process. That helps overcome a whole bunch of problems concerning creation, the problem of evil, and so forth.

Even if you don’t go that route, one of the best things about being a co-creator with God is that, if the future is open and hasn’t been determined, our co-creating helps create what happens next. It’s not all on God, and it’s not all on us. Together, we co-create.

That means you actually matter. Not just kind of matter, as if God decided to let you do a little. God, I hate this thing—and Matt, this might sound like I’m dissing you, but I’m not—so many theologians say, “God is allowing you to participate in the work,” as if God could just do it all alone.

What if God actually requires creaturely participation for love to win, for the kingdom of God to be established in its fullness? The Whiteheadian vision puts that kind of significance into your life, my life, our rabbit’s life, and everybody’s life. I think that’s pretty powerful.

Audience questions and discussion

ANDREW DAVIS: We have about ten minutes for questions. We’re curious how some of these transitions sit with you. There are far more than five; I point to ten at the end of my book, and there are more than ten. But these five suggest important moves—ideologically, existentially, and spiritually.

Any questions for the panelists or comments on the transitions? Yes, sir. I’ll try to repeat the question up here since we’re recording.

Divine power and voluntary self limitation

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We have this idea that if God could act to get rid of evil but doesn’t, that’s a problem. On the flip side, if God isn’t powerful enough to do things, that seems like a problem for most people’s religious sensibility. I wonder if there’s a third option. Maybe Matt alluded to it: there are times when I could punish my child, but I decide not to.

There’s a sermon—not a philosophical piece—that says God is like a mountain. Someone comes up and wants to pass through the mountain, but what really needs to change is their will. They shouldn’t want to pass through it anyway. The mountain does nothing. After five years, ten years, fifty years—however long it takes—the person’s will changes, and they turn back. [Some wording uncertain.]

Might a third option be something like Simone Weil’s idea that God creates by making God’s self small? If God is infinite, there’s no space for the other. Creation is a kind of self-mortification or yielding in God.

What would be lovely about this is that we wouldn’t have a different God in Genesis 1, where power is abusive and explodes outward, and in the Gospels, where God is weak and humble for thirty-some years and then kicks ass and takes names again. We’d have the same God all the way through. Even Genesis 1 would involve a kind of self-mortification: God could exert power but chooses not to.

ANDREW DAVIS: I’m not going to repeat all that. Tom, Sherry—any comments?

SHERRY KLING: There are process thinkers, like Thomas Hosinski, who have more of that sense of voluntary kenosis. My own perspective is a little more like that. I want to say that, for there still to be a world, God has to give up power. If God were to take all that power back, I really believe the world would disappear, because the world needs these kinds of boundaries in order to be embodied. There has to be that space.

That’s a little more my preference. It is an option, and there are process thinkers who articulate it.

THOMAS JAY OORD: Sherry’s right. It’s an option. It’s not one I like, but it’s on the table.

Here’s a dramatic response. I wrote a little book called God Can’t, which takes the view that God simply can’t stop evil. Your view is more like God usually doesn’t, or allows it.

I got a letter from a woman who had been sexually molested by her brother as a child. She said she had a vision, while she was being molested, that Jesus showed up next to her. For a couple of days, she felt comforted: God suffered with her and was present in the moment.

Then she thought, “Hold on. If Jesus could have stopped this, why didn’t he?” She said, “I walked away from God. If God has the ability to stop my rape and chooses not to, I’m not down for believing in God.”

Voluntary self-limitation has that problem, in my way of thinking. I prefer to look the abuse victim in the eye and say, “God couldn’t have stopped what happened to you,” rather than, “God allowed it for the time being.”

ANDREW DAVIS: God couldn’t have stopped it, not because of a lack in God, but because of who and what God is—namely, love.

THOMAS JAY OORD: Uncontrolling love.

MATT SEGALL: Whitehead says something about love operating patiently, slowly, quietly in the background. It doesn’t contend force with force. It’s not wielding the thunder, and so on. Nonetheless—and this is just a loose analogy—it’s a little like the weakest force in nature, gravity, which is tremendously creative if you give it enough time and space.

It may be that this seemingly weak human being who was crucified on the cross lost. But that event, that deed, seems slowly and quietly to have been changing the world. I agree with Ilia Delio this morning: the impact of this event is barely beginning to be felt in human hearts as an evolutionary transformation.

Be patient, I guess, is what I’m saying.

Human agency and the use of force

AUDIENCE MEMBER: As I think through these things, I keep coming back to the problem of evil: the horrible things that happen in the world, the violence, and our agency in responding. We have a responsibility to respond in anti-violent ways, to constrain the possibilities for violence available to other people, ourselves, societies, and institutions.

Does this put God in a position of needing humanity to address something God can’t address in God’s self? How do you envision that working? Human beings contain both the possibility of love and this other capacity that seems necessary to creation. Is there a kind of negative space, an absence of God, that needs to be filled with a presence through which God cannot otherwise act? Am I making sense?

ANDREW DAVIS: Is God in a position of needing something outside God’s self to address something God can’t touch? Who would like to start?

MATTHEW SEGALL: If I’m following, we have freedom. Human history is a series of horrific events, with the next generation always seeking revenge for what happened to the prior generation. It’s basically a cycle of revenge.

But we have—and maybe this is the imago Dei—the ability, the freedom, to forgive. If we were to forgive, which God can’t force us to do, maybe we could start to short-circuit some of these cycles. But that’s on us.

I think God is working in various ways to persuade us to make that decision, but it can’t be forced on us. Whether that’s a lack in God or just the nature of God, love and forgiveness can only be free decisions on our part. It wouldn’t actually be forgiveness if we had to do it. That would be coercion again.

I don’t know whether that touches your question, but that’s what came to mind.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: If we were constrained in the way God is constrained—if we became more godlike—would we be less able to address oppression? Maybe that’s a more precise way to put it. Does the move toward godliness make us more and more inept?

ANDREW DAVIS: In other words, we can’t use force if we’re more like God?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do we lessen our agency as we become more like God, until the closer we are to God, the less we can actually do?

THOMAS JAY OORD: When people ask about the problem of evil, we focus on God’s power, which is crucial. But there’s another crucial element, a difference between you and God that won’t change no matter how godly you become: you have a localized body. You can reach out and touch the guy behind you on the shoulder, opening new possibilities and delimiting others.

As localized creatures with bodies, we have certain forms of agency and capacities that God doesn’t have. God can do things we can’t do, because God is omnipresent. God is present everywhere. There is no place God isn’t, so there’s never a vacuum.

The question is whether God’s presence is attuned to and cooperated with. When people do evil, they’re not cooperating with God’s presence. It’s not that God has momentarily disappeared.

For us to become more godly isn’t to become omnipresent. It’s to try to align our choices with the ways of love.

ANDREW DAVIS: There’s the old adage that we are the hands and feet of God. If God can’t coerce, we can. Some situations require us to act coercively, and that might be a response to a persuasive lure to do so.

There are just-war theories—a painful tradition—but there are all sorts of situations in which coercive power is required to prevent evil or preserve life. Stopping a child from running into the street is a great example. If someone runs into your house trying to take you and your children out, you’re not going to say, “Well, God persuade you, so please don’t do that.”

I don’t [wording unclear] violence, but there are times when coercion is required. It’s complicated. That’s an interesting way of phrasing the question.

Let’s get to one more question for the sake of time. My eyes saw you first, in the back.

Becoming and contemplative rest

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m more in the contemplative school of Christian thinking—a Merton head more than a Whitehead head. I grew up very evangelical, in a context where everything was about what you were doing for God, in a very manipulative way. Getting away from that through the contemplative tradition has been very helpful: being with God and being present.

Hearing the dichotomy between being and becoming is a little scary to me. I feel as though I could be transported back to, “Brother Matthew, how are you doing for God?”—away from enjoying God’s presence. Do you have thoughts on the interaction with contemplative thought, or on being and doing, being and becoming? [Some wording reconstructed from the moderator’s restatement and the responses.]

ANDREW DAVIS: Is becoming a threat to contemplative life? Would that be one way to put it?

MATT SEGALLYou can’t rest in the being of God; you’re on the move. The whole universe is going somewhere, and you don’t want to get left behind.

But I don’tAnd like the dichotomization of being and becoming. That’s what I was trying to say earlier. At least in Whitehead’s process philosophy, it’s not all process all the time.

To recognize that change is occurring, you’re already presupposing something that doesn’t change, something permanent relative to which the change occurs. That’s in Whitehead, too. It’s more a polarity than a dichotomy.

Contemplative practice could be understood as a mode of becoming, but an inward intensification. It doesn’t need to take you out of the place of rest. It can allow you to deepen ever more into it. We don’t need to dichotomize them.

SHERRY KLING: Resting in God doesn’t have to be seen as static. It’s not a static resting. The eternal now is a now, is a now, is a now, is a now. It isn’t a static thing. You’re flowing with the flow.

THOMAS JAY OORD: Maybe one other angle: doing things for God. When I was younger, the idea was that if you didn’t do these things, God would be pissed and you’d be punished. But we don’t have a punishing God. That takes that right out of the picture.

We have a God who always loves, no matter what—even if you do the worst thing possible. God will always love you and, in the next moment, promote your well-being and call you to promote well-being. Maybe some of the negative baggage around doing things for God gets taken out by this emphasis on love.

ANDREW DAVIS: We do need to conclude. We can grab a beer and continue the conversation. Help me in thanking our panelists.